At last the hour of parting came. With the greatest reluctance Stanley gave his men the order, "Right about face." With a silent farewell, a grasp of the hands, and a look into each other's eyes which said more than words, the old man and the young man parted forever.
Livingstone's life work was almost done. Stanley was the man on whose shoulders his mantle was to fall. The great work he had accomplished in finding Livingstone was the beginning of his career as an African explorer.
After the death of Livingstone, Stanley determined to take up the explorer's unfinished work.
In 1874 he left England at the head of an expedition fitted out by the London Daily Telegraph and the New York Herald, and penetrated into the very heart of Africa.
He crossed the continent from shore to shore, overcoming on his march dangers and difficulties compared with which those encountered on his first journey sank into insignificance. He afterward gave an account of this expedition in his book entitled, "Darkest Africa."
Stanley had successfully accomplished one of the great works of the world. He had opened the way for commerce and Christianity into the vast interior of Africa, which, prior to his discoveries, had been marked on the map by a blank space, signifying that it was an unexplored and unknown country.
On his return the successful explorer found himself famous. Princes and scientific societies vied with one another in honoring him. King Edward VII of England, who was then Prince of Wales, sent him his personal congratulations; Humbert, the king of Italy, sent him his portrait; the khedive of Egypt decorated him with the grand commandership of the Order of the Medjidie; the Geographical Societies of London, Paris, Italy, and Marseilles sent him their gold medals; while in Berlin, Vienna, and many other large European cities, he was elected an honorary member of their most learned and most distinguished associations.
What pleased the explorer most of all, though, was the honor paid him by America. "The government of the United States," he says, "has crowned my success with its official approval, and the unanimous vote of thanks passed in both houses of the legislature has made me proud for life of the expedition and its achievements."
Honored to-day as the greatest explorer of his age, and esteemed alike for his scholarship and the immense services he has rendered mankind, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the once friendless orphan lad whose only home was a Welsh poorhouse, may well be proud of the career he has carved out for himself.
The Nestor Of American Journalists
"I heard that a neighbor three miles off, had borrowed from a still more distant neighbor, a book of great interest. I started off, barefoot, in the snow, to obtain the treasure. There were spots of bare ground, upon which I would stop to warm my feet. And there were also, along the road, occasional lengths of log fence from which the snow had melted, and upon which it was a luxury to walk. The book was at home, and the good people consented, upon my promise that it should be neither torn nor soiled, to lend it to me. In returning with the prize, I was too happy to think of the snow on my naked feet."
This little incident, related by Thurlow Weed himself, is a sample of the means by which he gained that knowledge and power which made him not only the "Nestor of American Journalists," but rendered him famous in national affairs as the "American Warwick" or "The King Maker."
There were no long happy years of schooling for this child of the "common people," whose father was a struggling teamster and farmer; no prelude of careless, laughing childhood before the stern duties of life began.
Thurlow Weed was born at Catskill, Greene County, New York, in 1797, a period in the history of our republic when there were very few educational opportunities for the children of the poor. "I cannot ascertain," he says, "how much schooling I got at Catskill, probably less than a year, certainly not a year and a half, and this was when I was not more than five or six years old."
At an early age Thurlow learned to bend circumstances to his will and, ground by poverty, shut in by limitations as he was, even while contributing by his earning to the slender resources of the family, he gathered knowledge and pleasure where many would have found but thorns and bitterness.
How simply he tells his story, as though his hardships and struggles were of no account, and how clearly the narrative mirrors the brave little fellow of ten!
"My first employment," he says, "was in sugar making, an occupation to which I became much attached. I now look with great pleasure upon the days and nights passed in the sap-bush. The want of shoes (which, as the snow was deep, was no small privation) was the only drawback upon my happiness. I used, however, to tie pieces of an old rag carpet around my feet, and got along pretty well, chopping wood and gathering up sap."
During this period he traveled, barefoot, to borrow books, wherever they could be found among the neighboring farmers. With his body in the sugar house, and his head thrust out of doors, "where the fat pine was blazing," the young enthusiast devoured with breathless interest a "History of the French Revolution," and the few other well-worn volumes which had been loaned him.
Later, after he left the farm, we see the future journalist working successively as cabin boy and deck hand on a Hudson River steamboat, and cheerfully sending home the few dollars he earned. While employed in this capacity, he earned his first "quarter" in New York by carrying a trunk for one of the passengers from the boat to a hotel on Broad Street.
But his boyish ambition was to be a journalist, and, after a year of seafaring life, he found his niche in the office of a small weekly newspaper, the Lynx, published at Onondaga Hollow, New York.
So, at fourteen, owing to his indomitable will and perseverance, which conquered the most formidable obstacles, Thurlow Weed started on the career in which, despite the rugged road he still had to travel, he built up a noble character and won international fame.
The Man With An Idea
It is February, 1492. A poor man, with gray hair, disheartened and dejected, is going out of the gate from the beautiful Alhambra, in Granada, on a mule. Ever since he was a boy, he has been haunted with the idea that the earth is round. He has believed that the pieces of carved wood, picked up four hundred miles at sea, and the bodies of two men, unlike any other human beings known, found on the shores of Portugal, have drifted from unknown lands in the west. But his last hope of obtaining aid for a voyage of discovery has failed. King John of Portugal, under pretense of helping him, has secretly sent out an expedition of his own. His friends have abandoned him; he has begged bread; has drawn maps to keep him from starving, and lost his wife; his friends have called him crazy, and have forsaken him. The council of wise men, called by Ferdinand and Isabella, ridicule his theory of reaching the east by sailing west. "But the sun and moon are round," replies Columbus, "why not the earth?" "If the earth is a ball, what holds it up?" the wise men ask. "What holds the sun and moon up?" Columbus replies.
A learned doctor asks, "How can men walk with their heads hanging down, and their feet up, like flies on a ceiling?" "How can trees grow with their roots in the air?" "The water would run out of the ponds, and we should fall off," says another. "The doctrine is contrary to the Bible, which says, 'The heavens are stretched out like a tent.'" "Of course it is flat; it is rank heresy to say it is round."
He has waited seven long years. He has had his last interview, hoping to get assistance from Ferdinand and Isabella after they drive the Moors out of Spain. Isabella was almost persuaded, but finally refused. He is now old, his last hope has fled; the ambition of his life has failed. He hears a voice calling him. He looks back and sees an old friend pursuing him on a horse, and beckoning him to come back. He saw Columbus turn away from the Alhambra, disheartened, and he hastens to the queen and